Suspire
by Elizabeth Kolkovich
A key term in this poem is “suspire,” meaning to sigh or breathe out. Pulter uses the word only a few times in her poetry, but it is part of a matrix of related words that Pulter frequently employs connected to sighs and breathing. Her manuscript is titled “Poems Breathed Forth,” and she imagines “suspiring” while weeping in Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter10 and On the Horrid Murder of That Incomparable Prince14. “Suspire” is not often used in the period, but it appears in some literary texts. One example is a soliloquy spoken by Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, in which he thinks that the king, his father, is dead:
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2
- Why doth the crown lie there upon his pillow,
- Being so troublesome a bedfellow?
- O polished perturbation! Golden care!
- That keep’st the ports of slumber open wide
- To many a watchful night. Sleep with it now!
- Yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet
- As he whose brow (with homely biggin [nightcap] bound)
- Snores out the watch of night. O majesty!
- When thou dost pinch thy bearer, thou dost sit
- Like a rich armor worn in heat of day,
- That scalds with safety. By his gates of breath
- There lies a downy feather which stirs not.
- Did he suspire, that light and weightless down
- Perforce must move. My gracious lord? My father?
- This sleep is sound indeed; this is a sleep
- That from this golden rigol [crown] hath divorced
- So many English kings. Thy due from me
- Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood,
- Which nature, love, and filial tenderness
- Shall (O dear father) pay thee plenteously.
- My due from thee is this imperial crown,
- Which, as immediate as thy place and blood,
- Derives itself to me. Lo, where it sits,
- Which God shall guard, and put the world’s whole strength
- Into one giant arm, it shall not force
- This lineal honor from me. This from thee
- Will I to mine leave, as ’tis left to me.
William Shakespeare, The Second Part of Henry the Fourth (London, 1600), sig. H3v-H4, Early English Books Online, with spelling, punctuation, and capitalization modernized.